Reed-Solomon codes may be used to protect data in memory or storage, where the capability to correct and erase burst errors allows various kinds of device failures to be tolerated. In general, a Reed-Solomon code may allow for the correction of up to r symbol errors, based on a code distance D (i.e., τ<D/2).
Various error correction methods have been developed to allow for the correction of a larger number of symbol errors (i.e., τ≥D/2) for some percentage of error patterns. These error correction methods may be referred to as list decoding methods, because they produce a list of potential error patterns (or valid code words). Given the list of potential error patterns, it is often possible to select the most likely error pattern (or valid code word) based on higher level information.